Designer Notes
This web site is the effort of hundreds of hours of hard work from each of the team members involved. I was the one that designed this web site inside out. The web site is made to be viewed in 800x600 or higher resolution and Internet Explorer 4.0 and Netscape Communicator.
Layers are an essential part of this web site as you may have seen. Layers have allowed us to display images and text in positions of the page where 3.X browser could not. With Layers, we were able to overlay text and picture on the same page. Layers in DHTML also opened a doorway for us to display text information as well. Information that would take multiple pages to display can all be put together in one page through the use of layers. We have found that by making a page completely with layers instead of frames and link, we were able to put a complete directory of information together. With other pages, one must click on a link to get to the information they want to look at. This process is time consuming and tedious; the browser has to reload entirely and connect to the sever again and again in order to obtain the information you want. Now, with our use of layer, everything is loaded into one page. You the user cannot see the hidden layers or images until you click on the appropriate button or image. These pages are merely a few kilobytes larger than normal single information pages.
The inspiration behind the look of the page was taken from the beauty of the universe. The background on the pages is black to reflect space but each page is filled with brilliant images of planets and galaxies, that is scattered in the night sky. Each section of page is vastly different in design and implementation. This difference was done intentionally in order to show that space hold many different beautiful bodies.
-Mark Gong